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DocPad

56
19
+ 1
24
Jekyll

2K
1.4K
+ 1
230
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DocPad vs Jekyll: What are the differences?

Developers describe DocPad as "Designers and developers can create websites faster than ever before". Empower your website frontends with layouts, meta-data, pre-processors (markdown, jade, coffeescript, etc.), partials, skeletons, file watching, querying, and an amazing plugin system. DocPad will streamline your web development process allowing you to craft full-featured websites quicker than ever before. On the other hand, Jekyll is detailed as "Blog-aware, static site generator in Ruby". Think of Jekyll as a file-based CMS, without all the complexity. Jekyll takes your content, renders Markdown and Liquid templates, and spits out a complete, static website ready to be served by Apache, Nginx or another web server. Jekyll is the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host sites right from your GitHub repositories.

DocPad and Jekyll can be categorized as "Static Site Generators" tools.

Some of the features offered by DocPad are:

  • Versioning
  • Pre-Built Skeletons
  • Language Agnostic

On the other hand, Jekyll provides the following key features:

  • Simple - No more databases, comment moderation, or pesky updates to install—just your content.
  • Static - Markdown (or Textile), Liquid, HTML & CSS go in. Static sites come out ready for deployment.
  • Blog-aware - Permalinks, categories, pages, posts, and custom layouts are all first-class citizens here.

"Plugins. Easy to use" is the primary reason why developers consider DocPad over the competitors, whereas "Github pages integration" was stated as the key factor in picking Jekyll.

DocPad and Jekyll are both open source tools. It seems that Jekyll with 38.1K GitHub stars and 8.31K forks on GitHub has more adoption than DocPad with 2.99K GitHub stars and 250 GitHub forks.

Decisions about DocPad and Jekyll
Manuel Feller
Frontend Engineer at BI X · | 4 upvotes · 161.6K views

As a Frontend Developer I wanted something simple to generate static websites with technology I am familiar with. GatsbyJS was in the stack I am familiar with, does not need any other languages / package managers and allows quick content deployment in pure HTML or Markdown (what you prefer for a project). It also does not require you to understand a theming engine if you need a custom design.

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Pros of DocPad
Pros of Jekyll
  • 4
    Npm
  • 3
    Open Source
  • 3
    Database-free
  • 3
    Plugins. Easy to use
  • 2
    Customizable
  • 2
    Helpful community
  • 2
    Free
  • 2
    Flexible
  • 2
    Cross-platform
  • 1
    GitHub Pages plugin
  • 74
    Github pages integration
  • 54
    Open source
  • 37
    It's slick, customisable and hackerish
  • 24
    Easy to deploy
  • 23
    Straightforward cms for the hacker mindset
  • 7
    Gitlab pages integration
  • 5
    Best for blogging
  • 2
    Low maintenance
  • 2
    Easy to integrate localization
  • 1
    Huge plugins ecosystem
  • 1
    Authoring freedom and simplicity

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Cons of DocPad
Cons of Jekyll
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 4
      Build time increases exponentially as site grows
    • 2
      Lack of developments lately
    • 1
      Og doesn't work with postings dynamically

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is DocPad?

    Empower your website frontends with layouts, meta-data, pre-processors (markdown, jade, coffeescript, etc.), partials, skeletons, file watching, querying, and an amazing plugin system. DocPad will streamline your web development process allowing you to craft full-featured websites quicker than ever before.

    What is Jekyll?

    Think of Jekyll as a file-based CMS, without all the complexity. Jekyll takes your content, renders Markdown and Liquid templates, and spits out a complete, static website ready to be served by Apache, Nginx or another web server. Jekyll is the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host sites right from your GitHub repositories.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use DocPad?
    What companies use Jekyll?
      No companies found
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      What tools integrate with DocPad?
      What tools integrate with Jekyll?
        No integrations found

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        Blog Posts

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        What are some alternatives to DocPad and Jekyll?
        Gatsby
        Gatsby lets you build blazing fast sites with your data, whatever the source. Liberate your sites from legacy CMSs and fly into the future.
        Hugo
        Hugo is a static site generator written in Go. It is optimized for speed, easy use and configurability. Hugo takes a directory with content and templates and renders them into a full html website. Hugo makes use of markdown files with front matter for meta data.
        VuePress
        A minimalistic static site generator with a Vue-powered theming system, and a default theme optimized for writing technical documentation. It was created to support the documentation needs of Vue's own sub projects.
        Hexo
        Hexo is a fast, simple and powerful blog framework. It parses your posts with Markdown or other render engine and generates static files with the beautiful theme. All of these just take seconds.
        Middleman
        Middleman is a command-line tool for creating static websites using all the shortcuts and tools of the modern web development environment.
        See all alternatives